By RENA SILVERMAN

December 5, 2017

When Nan Goldin looks at the photographs that defined her career, she recites a little prayer to herself: “Send love to each person that’s dead.”

For 30 years, her subjects have been those closest to her: Transsexuals, cross-dressers, drug users, lovers, all people she befriended when she moved to New York after her sister’s suicide, a succession of foster homes and struggles with parents she rejected as conformists. They lived in what mainstream critics would coldly call the “margins of society,” and many died during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

“They were family, a community,” she said. “And now most people are dead.”

All of these subjects and more are featured in “The Beautiful Smile,” a retrospective reissued by Steidl a decade after publication with Ms. Goldin’s Hasselblad award.

Born in the Washington, D.C. area, the youngest of four in a family she described as “intellectual and revisionist,” Ms. Goldin dreamed of New York City from childhood. After being expelled from several schools, leaving home and living with various foster families, she focused on her love of fashion photography and studied at the New England School of Photography and, later, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. There she met the drag queens who became her earliest subjects.

“I never realized until someone said it to me, that they were men dressed as women,” she said. “It never crossed my mind.”

“Bruno smoking a joint (with Valerie’s legs), Paris, 2001.”

Nan Goldin

It was her goal, at the time, to put the queens — who thrived in a nighttime underground community — on the cover of Vogue. Ms. Goldin’s hybrid of art photography and the snapshot aesthetic, autobiographical detail and documentary storytelling, was innovative at a time when most photographers had to choose between one or the other. Influenced most by Larry Clark’s “Tulsa,” an autobiographical body of work about troubled youth in his hometown, Ms. Goldin always found a way to put herself in the frame, sometimes physically.

In “Nan and Brian in bed,” or “the cover of everything,” as she calls it, Ms. Goldin is curled in a ball, clinging to her pillow, watching her then-boyfriend, Brian, smoke a cigarette, his bare back glowing in the heat and brilliance of the day’s last light.

“He broke my face,” said Ms. Goldin. “I still suffer from it.”

That was documented, too, in a self-portrait titled, “Nan one month after being battered.” (Slide 5) In it, she has impeccably tweezed eyebrows, nice jewelry and crimson lipstick – and two bruised eyes that stare blankly at the camera.

“I published the picture,” she explained, “so I would never go back to him.”

Other images show lovers, many of whom were in the slideshow that made her career, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” With couples, she explored the struggle between intimacy and autonomy, and the inevitable dependency that she feels comes with romantic relationships.

“Any lover relationship has that, particularly between men and women,” she said. “It’s a real struggle. I don’t feel it with my friends so much, and my friends are who I live with. They’re my emotional life.”

The publication of her retrospective book marks the end of one chapter in her life and the beginning of another: Ms. Goldin has moved on from photography. Instead, she has taken up painting.

“My work used to affect people who felt lost, showed them they weren’t alone,” she said. “Helped young ones. A gay boy from Turkey told me last month that I saved his life. This is what my work was meant to do.”

Not anymore. Now she feels her photos no longer help anyone. “Nor do my paintings, but they’re for me,” she said. “An unfamiliar landscape with an unknown language.” This is something of an emotional balm when she looks at her photographs taken over the decades.

“I lost most of my friends,” she said. “There’s a generation missing in the history of the 20th century.”

Correction: Dec. 6, 2017:An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the schools that Nan Goldin attended. It was the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, not Boston School of Fine Arts.